For lunch (and dinner, actually) on Sunday (March 7), I made the chicken soup stock into a Greek red lentil soup. This recipe comes from Rebar (Alsterberg & Urbanowicz, 2001, p. 123). It’s a refreshing soup, with hints of lemon and lots of garlic (I used an entire bulb!). It also suggests that you garnish it with feta cheese. I happened to be in Sobeys and they sell a local sun-dried tomato feta, so I used that!

YUM!!

And, I slept well! And woke up in a good mood. Whether that’s the soup talking or just taking it easy on Sunday (my belly wasn’t the best after having eaten something that had gone a little off), I can’t say. I often wrestle with insomnia so, perhaps, bone soup is the way to go (Ballantyne, 2017, p. 179; Yumadera et al., 2007, in McDonnell 2020)! The experiment continues!

Regardless, it’s a lovely soup using home-made chicken broth. The main ingredients were 2 cups of lentils and a couple lemons. The cost of the soup was probably, at most, $10, including the expensive feta garnish. It made at least 8 servings, so MUCH cheaper than the Amy’s soups I was buying for my dad and a lot yummier!

Part of this experience is to reconnect myself with one of my passions (cooking) and combine it with another (sustainability). I am struggling with finding the time, but when I take a sip of this beautiful soup and flip through the pages of the recipes, I know it’s worth the effort to make this a daily practice.

Reference List

Alsterberg, Audrey & Urbanowicz, Wanda. (2001). Rebar: modern food cookbook. Big Ideas Publishing Inc.

Ballantyne, Sarah. (2017). Paleo-Principles. Victory Belt Publishing.

McDonell, Kayla. (2020). Bone broth: How to make it and 6 reasons why you should. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bone-broth.

Yumadera, W., Inagawa, K., Chiba, S., Bannai, M., Takahashi, M. & Nakayma, K. (2007). Glycine ingestion improves subjective sleep quality in human volunteers, correlating with polysomnographic changes. Sleep and Biological Rhythms 5, 126-131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-8425.2007.00262.x